Gian Michele Calvi is Professor at Pavia, Italy, and Adjunct Professor at the North Carolina State University. He received a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley, a PhD from the Politecnico di Milano and a Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cujo, Mendoza, Argentina. He has been the founder of the Eucentre Foundation and of the ROSE School (which originated the UME School); he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the GEM Foundation and is one of the Directors of the International Association of Earthquake Engineering. He is author of hundreds of publications and of two major books: Seismic design and retrofit of bridges (with M.J.N. Priestley and F. Seible, 1996) and Displacement-Based Seismic Design of Structures (with M.J.N. Priestley and M.J. Kowalsky, 2007). He has been designer, consultant or checker for hundreds of structural projects, including the Rion-Antirion cable stayed bridge (2883 m, in Greece), the Bolu viaduct (119 spans, in Turkey) and the new housing system after L’Aquila earthquake (2009), with 185 buildings seismically isolated with more than 7,000 devices, completed in about six months. He is associate editor of the Journal of Earthquake Engineering (Taylor and Francis) and editor of Progettazione Sismica (IUSS Press, Pavia), a journal in Italian addressed to practitioners. He has been invited keynote speakers in tens of conferences, including two World and three European Conferences on Earthquake Engineering. He has been always active in conceptual innovation in seismic design, focusing on masonry in his early days, on bridges, displacement– based design and seismic isolation from the nineties.
ABSTRACT - Performing full scale in situ dynamic testing
The main scope of the presentation will be to critically evaluate the possibility of operating on existing buildings to subject them to some seismic excitation at the base.
The possibility of inserting a new foundation and an isolation system under some existing building and of developing a movable loading system will be considered.
Essentially, the discussion will focus on the definition of practical and feasible approaches to realize operable shaking-tables under building foundations. This will require an analysis of the needed operations, discussing difficulties and questionable aspects for each phase.
The complete procedure is essentially a combination of two different and uncorrelated experiences. The first one refers to several cases in which a new foundation system has been constructed under existing buildings, which have then be uplifted and partially lowered again after the insertion of some isolation devices.
The second one is related to the application of dynamic excitations to isolated buildings, shaking them by the application of dynamic loading originated by a movable fully equipped and autonomous laboratory.
The combination of the two experiences, which will described and discussed in some detail, is not at all trivial, posing, amongst others, problems of capacity and control.
Features and problems of a new movable laboratory under construction and of some first test foreseen within a few months will close the presentation.
